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Whether or not you are building your own computer, there are some interesting challenges that are transparent to users, but whose actual implementation seems like a stroke of genius or even magic. One of those challenges is memory management. Sounds boring? Far from it!

In modern day operating systems you barely have to deal with garbage collection, things became so easy for the kids. But a language with garbage collection is kind of luxury already, if you compare it to memory management back in the 8-bit days.

To be fair, there are only few multithreading implementations for 8-bit hardware (but there are) and most programs at the time could simply do with RAM whatever they wanted. But the next logical step was memory management.

Think about it for a moment. It is definitely no easy task, but you can also take a shortcut. Gustavo Duarte dealt with that problem already long time ago. His article about memory management is part of a series and so old, one could nearly call it 'retro'.  Nevertheless, it is a refreshing read and even though most images fall victim to a 404, you can learn a thing. Or two. Or eighthundredsixtythree.

Decide for yourself.